Had a great New Year’s – staying up late with fireworks and champagne is the best! I read that a few friends couldn’t make it to midnight and I’ve coined the term celegraytion – the inability to party later than eight o’clock.

I don’t really make “resolutions”, I’m always adding new things (projects and/or goals) to my pile. Having said that, 2010 is the “year of writing”.

Did I mention the contest? I’m deep in writing mode for this project, a two hour spec pilot about a bike messenger with Asperger’s. It’s a clever story and I really like the characters.

There’s a lot in the script. Aside from introducing the characters, the worlds, etc. there are two crimes. Not a huge deal, but having our hero bounce from one to the other was more difficult than I thought.

Anyway, a couple more weeks and it’ll be sent off and I get to look into the other spec scripts I’m writing.

So busy lately, mostly doing real paying sort of work. It’s a good thing, since I have a mortgage and all, but it’s kept me from all my other projects.

Worked on a fun video project with Vanessa the Clockwork Holiday

I also managed to get my old Chistmas Story video online. I made it a couple years ago, but it still amuses me.

The other big project that I’m working on is a script for a contest. It’s a two hour TV pilot, a procedural show that involves a woman that solves crimes. I’ll share more when I have time, but it’s looking like a pretty tight deadline.

And one thing that I haven’t done? Christmas shopping. We’re expecting a blizzard tomorrow, which will probably affect my ability to take care of that tomorrow and maybe even Monday. I’m working on cancelling Christmas, which would help.

On the bright side, being snowed in will give me some more time to work on my script.

My New Year’s resolution – 10 spec TV scripts in 2010. 10 in ’10!

It’s a crazy aggressive schedule, but I can do it. There are a lot of programs that I would enjoy writing for, I’ll probably start with Drop Dead Diva and you know my love for Castle. After the success of my scripts for The Office and Psych, I’ve realized I can write humor and I enjoy a good procedural. I’ve also realized that writing a sitcom is hard, that I’ll probably stick to the procedurals.

The reason I’m waiting until next year is that I’m busy with another writing project. More when I have time, but it’s a two hour TV pilot for a contest in 8 weeks.

By the way, as I mentioned in my tweet, I’ve been working on a game-related website. It’s a test of automated Flash game publishing (using MochiAds as a source) – I have 5116 games queued up and a handful are posted on the site every day.

The name Gulp Games is an old one, the origins surrounded in mystery, lies, and deceit.

Well, not really. It’s the name that Greg, Lee, and Pete picked when thinking about developing video games. About 20 years ago. Anyway, we used the first letter of our names, added a “u” and called it done. Pete and I are still waiting for Greg to finish his third of the game…

MochiAds are a nice (but slow) way of making money. For every game you play, I make $0.0001 – if 31 million people play every day then I’ll be a millionaire within a year!

But in the meantime, I’ll keep my day job. And I’ll keep writing…

I think this is the fourth time I’ve titled a blog post “sick again”. Meh.

Every year I catch a cold. It’s usually a week-long thing and I’ve grown accustomed to holing up through the worst of it. This year I had a relapse (I was going to title this post “Frankie Says Relapse”, but deemed that too silly for public usage). Three days of super-sick, then a day of “yay, it’s gone”. Now I’m sick again.

The big problem is that I’m afraid that catching a cold this early in the season will increase my chances of catching a second one before next spring. I’ve basically turned into a sickly old man. This has got to stop.

In the meantime, I’m going to make a cup of tea, put my cardigan on, and shuffle through the house grumbling about the neighbor’s kids.

Where’s my tissue? Oh, tucked in my sleeve.

I’m too busy to update my social network statuses. I hate to keep updating my Facebook profile with “too busy to update this,” but it’s sadly true.

I discovered HootSuite a nice web interface for Twitter – it lets me schedule tweets, so I can sit and write a handful when I have time. So my Twitter feed looks like I’m more active, but it’s all a lie – I wrote most of those a couple weeks ago.

In fact I just scheduled something for Dec 15th, a Christmas related joke.

So, to recap: friend me on Facebook, then follow me on Twitter and you’ll know when I’m too busy to tell you what I’m doing.

Oh, and if you Tweet, here’s a bunch of TV related Twitterings

I’ve been getting questions on Facebook about the scripts I wrote. I thought I’d address some things here.

First off, I wrote three “spec” scripts for existing TV shows. These have absolutely no value, they’re not going to be produced, and you’ll never get a chance to enjoy them. That’s the nature of TV spec scripts – you create them as writing samples.

I think they’re pretty strong writing samples, they shows that I can write for one-hour “procedurals” and they also show that I have a strong grasp on comedy writing. They also show that I don’t know what I’m doing.

The first thing I did wrong was pick some random shows to write. If I’d done a little research, I would have picked different shows. After talking with people at the awards ceremony, I learned the following:

1) CSI is over done. It’s been on the air so long that there are a ton of spec scripts and people are tired of reading them. Add the cast upheaval this season and some people think I made up some of the characters.

2) The Office script should not have continued a storyline. When Michael left to start his own paper company, I looked at the TV Guide and thought the show was on Summer break. Sadly, they only skipped a week and by the time I’d written my episode, the show was back on the air – continuing the same story I’d continued.

3) Psych isn’t well known. When someone familiar with the show reads my script, they love it. If they don’t know the show, then the script seems a little random. I get comments like “what’s with the flashback at the beginning” and “Gus doesn’t sound like a police officer, you should review his dialog”.

Luckily I didn’t have time to write an episode of Monk, which would have been a bad idea since this is the last season of the show. People don’t seem to like reading shows that aren’t on the air any more.